Farewell lecture Eelco Vogt: 'Op weg naar een fossiel-vrije toekomst'

Prof. Dr Eelco T.C. Vogt will will deliver his farewell lecture as Professor of Industrial Heterogeneous Catalysis at Utrecht University on 27 May. Eelco Vogt’s farewell lecture is entitled: ‘Towards a fossil-free future’.

The farewell lecture is open to invited guests only. If you would like to receive an invitation, please contact the secretariat of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis (science.secr.icc@uu.nl).

Towards a fossil-free future

Our society is facing a number of major transitions, in which the role of fossil raw materials such as oil, coal and gas will rapidly diminish. This means developing alternative raw materials and new processes to meet the needs of an ever-growing world population. Chemists are hard at work developing these new raw materials and processes and are already able to outline a number of these solutions. For example, it is possible to extract part of the required carbon from biomass, plastic waste, and perhaps even CO2, using cheap green hydrogen made by electrolysis of water. To actually realize these solutions, gigantic investments are needed, because new refineries, chemical complexes and infrastructure must be built on the scale of current processes (we simply have to replace 100 million barrels of oil per day). How can we provide chemists and technologists of the future with the tools to turn today's ideas into the society of 2050?  What are the most promising solutions, what challenges lie ahead, and what will it actually cost.